Monday, January 20, 2014

NY state senator says: psych eval for all little children

It’s been referred to the education committee twice, most recently a week ago. NY State Senator Margaret Markey introduced it in 2013.

Previously, Markey won a few minutes of fame for introducing a bill that would stop all restaurants from using salt in their meals.

AB 8186 requires all public schoolchildren in NY to have two health examinations in elementary grades and two in secondary grades. These exams must include a psychological evaluation, which certifies “that the child is mentally fit to permit attendance at [public] school.”

No certificate, no school.

Aside from the fact that this psych exam is invasive and potentially disturbing to a child as young as five, and aside from the fact that it violates privacy considerations, it’s bogus down to its core, because psychology isn’t a science and never was.

Psychology is, to put it politely, a bunch of morons deciding what mental health is all about.

Using high-sounding terminology, these professionals label patients with conditions, none of which are based on defining physical tests. No blood, urine, or saliva tests. No genetic tests. No brain scans.
“Mental health” itself is a linguistic artifact, and bears no relation to life, energy, curiosity, creativity. It’s a phantasmagorical standard, designed to draw in patients.

Attaching psychologists to schools is about as useful as attaching barnacles and mold to a ship.

Historically, as the concept of sin weakened its hold on the population, “new scientists” stepped into the breach with categories of “mental disorders.”

“You’re not bad, you’re ill.”

Here’s the sticking point. Psychologists aren’t entirely stupid. They rely on mental-disorder labels that, to a certain extent, mirror human behavior. For example, a child who is sad and lonely is slapped with a diagnosis of “clinical depression.”
The fact is, the child is lonely and sad, and the possible reasons are many. But none of them implies a Condition called clinical depression. There is no Condition.

Researchers, allied with pharmaceutical interests, have trotted out a catch-all term to explain so-called mental disorders: “chemical imbalance” in the brain. The drug companies then supply the drugs that are said to correct the imbalance. Profits soar.

This is non-scientific lying compounded. Researchers have never proved there is a normal baseline for brain chemistry. How then could they have established what an imbalance is?

Can a child have problems? Can he be in trouble? Can he be trouble to other children? Of course. Any reasonably intelligent adult can spot these things. But again, this has nothing to do with a Condition.

And a psych eval conducted by a psychologist on a five-year old, to determine whether the child will be allowed to go to school? Absurd.

You would be much closer to the truth saying a psychologist who is part of that system is crazy, than saying a little boy or girl has a Condition.

So what’s going on with politicians who are trying to impose psychology and psychiatry on children (and adults)? Most politicians are merely ill-informed, and they’re putting their faith in this pseudoscience in the same way that people put their faith in a self-appointed priest class that claims it is the worshiper’s only connection to God.

Politicians, of course, always look for answers that make government larger and more intrusive, because it is government to which a politician is ultimately loyal.

But there are other political animals who are more aware. They understand that the real issue is control. They want to be able to hijack freedom and place populations under the gun.

They want the right to say a dissident, a rebel, an outsider, a critic, someone “who is different” is a threat. And they want to back that up with treatment. Which means re-education, indoctrination, and debilitating drugs.

A kinder, gentler face on the old Soviet psychiatric system.

Why wait until adulthood to impose that system? Why not start early, with a five-year old, whose mind can be tinkered with by professionals?

Understand, if it isn’t clear already, that the government, through licensing, enables and certifies a monopoly on the mind, by stating that psychology and psychiatry are officially approved methods.

What right does government have to make that claim? It has no right. It has no rational reason to be in that business.

But a politician abandons rationality as soon as he gets a whiff of the power that government affords.